The setting looked different by the light of the waking world. The grave was no longer empty and already there was grass sprouting on the packed mound of the burial. There was a tree behind the headstone when he’d visited it by night, but there was no sign of ribbons or deflated balloons hanging from its branches. Upon seeing this, he had no choice but to conclude that his so-called OBEs were merely a recurring dream. “Who would have a ceremony for a dead daughter at an open grave in front of a tree with pink ribbons and balloons?” Owen said aloud, admonishing his own foolishness. With that thought, his perception of being a sleeper went from freedom to suffocation. A sinking deeper into oblivion.

As he walked down the last row of graves on the way to the gravel path, he saw, pressed by the wind against the chain link fence separating the cemetery from the park, a finger’s length of frayed pink ribbon. He strode off course to where it was trapped and took it. Rubbing it between his fingers, he sought to verify its reality. In his imagination he saw the cemetery workers filling in the grave and cutting down the decorations. He wondered if there could have been enough time for all that since the memorial for Helen. It had been windy lately, and a shred might have easily blown free. He was so pleased to have found it. The little piece of material evidence confirmed his faith in Melody and what she’d been telling him.

Across the picnic table that night, he told her about the death of Helen Roan, the hit in the head that made him a sleeper, and his test, comparing the girl’s night grave and beribboned tree to the same scene in daylight. The two of them glowed pale blue against the dark, talking in low voices, not because they had to but because that’s the way they would have spoken on a spring night in the waking world. Then he showed Melody the piece of pink ribbon he’d found against the fence and spoke about how it immediately mended his perception of her and of being a sleeper.

“Owen, you have to understand,” she said. “At night, when we rise up from our sleeping bodies and walk the neighborhood, the world isn’t exactly like waking life. There are things that can influence the night world. You already know it has its own predators, the cutters and the miasma. Sometimes, something from your dreams can slip into the night world. 99.9 percent of what you’re seeing and experiencing is the same as the waking world, but there is a small percentage of times where you’ll run into something inexplicable. Something concocted by your ego or id or whatever those processes are that take place in the shadiest corners of your imagination. Nothing to worry about until it happens,” said Melody.